The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1887-01-29
THINGS OF WHICH WEARY

meaning than the current slang, snakes
me tired" But for the sake of all that Is
decorous and graceful in language, for
bear to use it, and will only say meekly
that there are three things, nay, four, of
which am very weary, and that in my
complaint against them I believe voice
the woes of thousands.
In the first place, am weary of the
social as a means of making money to
meet church expenses. Two dozen or
more busy housewives bake quantity of
bread and cake, which they convey to the
home of another housewife, who has bor-
rowed teaspoons, china and chairs, feel
ing secretly that she is about to endure
an inhiction, and more or less an aff1ic-
ton. At the appointed hour the busy
housewives appear with their several
families and eat up the provisions they
have furnished, at SO much the plate.
Outsiders can be counted usually on the
fingers of one hand. There are, in fact,
few outsiders to be inveigled, since all
denominations are at one in the matter
of raising money by means of suppers.
1t Is useless to say to the world, Come
and be our guests this evening. We
are going to meet to become better &C.
quainted, that We may be more firmly
united by sympathy, more helpful to
each other and our kind" The world
knows very well that the supper tickets
will be sold for twenty-five or fifty cents
for the benefit of the pastors salary, or
an organ, or repairs, or new carpet, or
the church debt which exists only because
original sin and shiftlessness have not
been quite eliminated by saving grace in
certain hearts.
The brethren have got tired" L once
heard smear" brother say. The con-
sequence OF his WEAKNESS was that the
women of that church undertook to coax
the necessary funds from the brethren by
viands for which the brethren paid. The
final result was that the most self deny
ing mothers in the church were over
worked, and the church finances received
a sum scarcely equal to the first cost of
the provisions furnished. By all means
cultivate hospitality in churches, but not
hospital atty"
Secondly, I am weary of the mother-in-
law as a basis of joke. Curiously
enough, it is always the mans mother-in-
law who is thus dealt with. A mans
mother rarely finds his wife good enough
for him. If he fails in an undertaking,
it is always, in her opinion, his wife's
fault. If his children are ugly, they
feature his wife's kin. If they form bad
habits, or have unhappy dispositions, the
fault, so Johns mother believes, is in
Johns wife. And John himself not in
frequently does what he can to make his
mother bug-bear. He praises his moth
er's cookery when he has dyspepsia, and
wonders why Matilda can not make some
thing that tastes as good as his mothers
pie did when he was fifteen and had come
home from squirrel hunting. And while
he expects his fine establishment to go on
without creaking, he wonders that Ma
tilda finds one servant can not do the
work. Why, his mother did the work
for family of six with her own hands.
In spite of these facts and the still more
suggestive one that if the husbands
mother becomes permanent member of
the family, she may always be at the
wife's elbow, and has it in her power to
interfere with her life in a way no man
would tolerate for an hour, the woman's
mother-in-law has yet to be gibbeted.
Like our most pestiferous weeds and
the English sparrow. the mother n-law
joke is imported. Its original inventor
was, L have no doubt, very like the
brother-in- law of a friend of mine. My
friend had no home, and supported her.
self by her needle. At the call OF her
sister she iourneyed 800 miles to attend
her through childbirth. She paid her
own expenses, though her brother-in-law
was well-to-do farmer. The only help
in the inconvenient house was an igno-
rant Irish girl aged about fifteen. No
nurse was engaged. There were several
hired men, and a large dairy. Somehow
my friend, who is a woman of great
energy, managed to care for her sister
and the household, besides making but
ter daily. At the end of two weary
months, the invalid was able to be about,
and her husband said casually one even
ing. "Well, Jane, Mina's gettin' SO
smart, s'pose you can go any time you
want to-"
Never a word of thanks that she had
spent two months in exhausting toll for
him for nothing escaped him. She had
come at her own expense, and might now
return to her dressmaking at her own ex-
pense. 1t probably never entered his
head that he owed her anything, or that
it was suitable that she should remain in
his house moment longer than was
necessary to his wife.
That there are thousands of homes
where the mother-in-law receives a sons
kindness from her daughters husband,
no one doubts. Nevertheless, IA old
fashioned ears, the mother-in-law joke,
vulgar and brutal as it is, sounds danger
GUS. There is nothing funny in being
old and dependent; nothing funny in a